It may be said that we become most aware of the bonds we share when those bonds are threatened; we realize how powerful they had been all along when they become strained. A woman misses her father most acutely when he is no longer around. A man in exile yearns with nostalgic ache for his home country. A marriage, like a manacle, chafes when love grows cold. All of these are fertile nodes of inquiry. But what of our untroubled bonds, what of the relations in which we are at ease? Here Achebe offers us an Igbo proverb by which we advance: “Where one thing stands, another will stand beside it.” There is something against which ease rests, something it stands beside. Literature must illuminate those as well. 

Two visual artists: Khaled Olufemi Mamah (Fhemy.raw) and Sambacor Konate (Le Jardin Jolof) discuss African art, fashion, photography, masks, history, and griot tradition in Mali and other parts of West Africa. They speak in the […]

We are pleased to announce the 2023 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows at A Long House! Ese Emmanuel and Dennis Mugaa have been selected as this year’s fellows. They’ll be succeeding the inaugural fellows, Clarie Gor […]

“I think it’s such a unique place in which to come of age, all those multiple cultural influences, that sense of being at the edge, even marginal, but also not completely cut off from the country & world. And then that Pwani aesthetic of being fiercely private but open. The unspoken morality, that sense of manners, respectability, slowness, proud resignation, the casual vulgarity, etc. I could go on. I don’t know. It has a hold on me. I’ve stopped questioning it.”

“We don’t have as much control as we think we do. And I understand that’s a terrifying realization. The person I think I am now may slip away from me in the next hour. Can I afford to admit this to myself? The world outside our heads can be such a chaotic place, even with the social structures we’ve established to make it less so. Being able to say “this is who I am” when everything else feels uncertain, flimsy, prone to dissolution, may be the greatest comfort we have. Is anything more seductive, more empowering?”

“Before now, I used to think death was the
nothing every other thing returns to,
but it’s safer, I suppose, to learn by practice.”

“This dearth of editorial talent on the continent often results in the mistranslation of sensibility, or subjectivity when foreign editors take on African books. We conceived this fellowship in response to that. We conceived of this fellowship in response to this.”

“In creating this fellowship, we asked ourselves what tradition we could follow to indicate the continuation of a lineage—someone whose work, though not much talked about, changed the trajectory and development of literature on the continent—and we immediately thought of the great Rajat Neogy, who founded Transition when he was just 22”

“Dear God,
Won’t you whisper to the man on the pulpit
that old things have passed away?”